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Angie Macri

GOLCONDA

after Lorca

Minerals of the earth’s vessels, veins. A girl with dark eyes watches semis run, diamonds circling the ring finger of her dreams. A ferry has run, the pride of a woman whose husband called this place Sarahville, a name changed by men who thought of Corinth but then a citadel, a market grown on a shepherd’s hill, minerals traded in a fortress. The Cherokee have crossed, a dollar a head. River traffic has docked at the wharf: showboats with melodeons and barges of fluorspar through the lock and dam. Warehouses fill until the flood wall is built, until the dam is moved upriver to the largest twin locks system in the world. Like the rest, she wants to go: iron to water, through miter gate leaves. A girl with dark eyes watches semis run, hubcaps diamonds in the sun above old paths of melodeons, discarded veins.

UNWEAVED:

bottomland forest, forest on the slope, post oak flats, prairie, the mound on the ridge, limestone, shale outcroppings, creek, the pits that indicate homes, chert, and the people who moved between, using each before being buried.

With the terrific sound of the earth turning inside out, awesome in tons, the Springfield and Herrin seams were upheaved day and night, the light east of the County Line Road constant, brilliant as if the heart of a star was burning out.

The sap of the silver maple and the weight of the river birch, the mines stripped across them all with heavy machines. The panther crossed the ridge on its way.

SWEET EVERLASTING

Sweet everlasting spreads leaves, each with its one vein, through Eight Mile, Four Mile, Mud, Conant. The prairies form from old forests or lakes. Fire is force at Plum Creek, Flat, Crow, Dutch, Smooth, Horse. They broke the sod with its deep rods away from the fire in Grand Cote, Jordan, Looking Glass, Poor, Old Pearl. Prairie, green, no one remembers such names but historians and great-grandfathers who come to meet death on earth. Butterflies draw poison from milkweed and, as monarchs, rule bluestem, allium, ambrosia, goldenrod, pasture rose, senna, dandelion, quinine, cordgrass. Read white, seeds, sweet, all everlasting to me in my father’s books mildewing on their edges, in his journals of what he’s seen, in what I’ve found where grain and coal now fall.

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Angie Macri is the author of Underwater Panther (forthcoming from Southeast Missouri State University Press), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize. Her recent work appears in Arts & Letters, Heron Tree, and Sugar House Review. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she teaches in Little Rock.